26 Responses:

Not that this will help with the above travesty, but maybe a future package can be spared. Wherever possible (and the sender is willing/able to do it) I request any packages to be sent with this beautiful phrase written on them "HAND STAMP ONLY-NONMACHINABLE". Believe it or not, it works!

Ping us at info (at) HeavyInk and tell us what comic was destroyed and we'll get you a new copy out ASAP. It's not an official announced policy, but we almost always help folks out when the USPS mangles their mail. Given that we have free shipping, we can't afford to do this a hundred times in a row - if we get customers who get their packages mangled ALL the time, we tell them to upgrade to paid UPS shipping.

I'm still astounded by the low level of service that USPS is allowed to practice. You pay them, but they make absolutely no guarantees that it will actually arrive or not be horribly damaged in the process. If you want them to actually be accountable for the service they're supposedly providing you need to pay extra for insurance.

I don't think this would be accepted in any other industry and it feels borderline illegal.

...and it's illegal to offer a competing service. The USPS has actually taken companies to court for using FedEx for documents that the USPS deems "not urgent".

...and don't even get me started on what it's like to interface to them as a business. We are, by far, the largest user of mail in the entire town of Arlington. We moved into a new building a while back, in part, so that we would be 20 feet from the USPS loading dock. USPS guys wander over every month or two to talk to us and see how things are going.

...and yet I ** STILL ** can not get straight answers from them half the time. They tell me things like "your outgoing labels exactly conform to the specifications we printed ... and yet, our machines are bouncing 5% of them, and they have to be hand sorted, and this increases shipping times. So, you need to change something...but we have no idea what it is you have to change".

...and did I mention that there is, apparently, no way to find out how much prepaid value remains in your Postage Permit account, and you can't fund it with credit cards, and you can't fund it over the Internet, and you can only fund it by mailing in a check, and 1/4 of the checks we send in get lost, and the only person in the entirety of Boston who can process these checks is gone on vacation ... for 10 days ...

ARGGGGH.

I do note that in our business plan we list one of our competitive advantages as the ability to negotiate this maze better than most other small or medium size companies. We have to fill out dozens of PS-3605-Rs every day (a document released by the USPS as a PDF ... but it's not a PDF form, oh, no, that would be too easy. So we have Ruby invoke ImageMagick on it to fill in fields. GAH.)

It was also interesting seeing how GreenCine worked with USPS before they got bought out by a porn company, moved to SoCal and their service became entirely terrible.

Netflix gets by because they're big enough to make the post office conform to them in order to deal with the quantity of mail they send out. The competition tends to get horribly shafted even when they're trying to do the exact same thing.

My only semi-recent USPS story involves them losing a package about two years ago only to leave a package notice about a month later stating that they'd tried to deliver it on a Sunday. Turns out it was my missing package that I'd already had replaced by Amazon.

In getting my own comics shipped (sorry, you run a great service, but a friend of mine owns another company) I haven't really had any problem in getting simple media mail packages shipped to me. I did, however, long ago decide to get insurance added on to them.

I greatly prefer USPS to UPS or FedEx--lower prices and they don't artificially delay your packages because you didn't choose the more expensive option--but it seems everyone has a horror story about every provider. The only thing that really pisses me off is that they discontinued international surface mail, thus allowing UPS and FedEx to jack their rates up even higher and leaving you with no options for packages other than air mail (most of the time, I don't care how fast it gets there, just that it does).